Michelangelo Antonioni’s long slide from critical favour may or may not be reversed by the re-release of this late work from 1982, a midlife or latelife crisis of a movie that Antonioni made at the age of 70 and was his last serious solo directorial work. (I would much prefer to see a revival of his tremendous and neglected film The Lady Without Camelias from 1953.)
Anyway, this revives his signature themes – metaphysical mystery, existential anxiety, sexual obsession – and there are some definite, pleasing flourishes. But unfortunately, as with the later movies of Fellini, there are some softcore sex scenes and a preposterously romanticised and eroticised search for the ideal (and sexually available) woman; the concept of the sexually restless middle-aged film-maker auditioning young women to be in his movies jars a little.
Our hero is Niccolò, played by Tomas Milian, a movie director who is broodingly between projects and creatively blocked. One day he finds himself at the office of his sister, a gynaecologist; she is frantically busy, so he good-naturedly helps out by taking a call from one of her patients, a beautiful, aristocratic woman called Maria Vittoria, or “Mavi”, played by the glacially charismatic Daniela Silverio. Simply attracted by the sound of her voice, he impulsively finds her number from his sister’s appointments book, calls her and they soon begin a passionate affair. This bizarre and highly inappropriate advance might in the hands of another director be the subject of worldly black comedy. And – who knows? – Antonioni maybe intended, at some level, a kind of deadpan comedy in it. But comedy would be the enemy of this film’s eroticism.
Soon Niccolò detects hostility among Mavi’s patrician friends and family; there are shadowy threats from an anonymous goon hanging around in the streets and eventually the entrancing Mavi simply disappears, after which Niccolò tries to find comfort with another woman, Ida (Christine Boisson), with whom he has a (stylishly photographed) interval in wintry Venice. But she turns out to be pregnant with another man’s child and that relationship also ends in calamity, leaving Niccolò to ponder his desolate idea for a science-fiction movie featuring an asteroid heading inexorably out into space.
Perhaps the most distinctive scenes are those in which Niccolò attends a very grand black-tie affair with Mavi, and senses a blank, unreadable hostility among all the grand people present. They have that same jaded, eerie ennui to be seen in other Antonioni films with a party scene, and it is intriguing to contrast them with formal scenes in a Buñuel film. Buñuel might invite the audience to step back and savour the surreal absurdity of these ritualistic events, while Antonioni wants you to step inside and inhale the unwholesome, oppressive atmosphere.
Identification of a Woman is a movie from which there may not yet be quite enough historical perspective to turn its datedness into period charm. Yet the strangeness and haunted anxiety is potent.
• Identification of a Woman is on digital platforms and Blu-Ray from 12 September.
